Learning page design

I work with a designer who thinks this way. It's maddening. Just draw the boxes early, then adjust if necessary. It's much easier to adjust on the fly than to build from scratch at the last minute.

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When we were a slot/rim operation and I was working slot, I always had in the back of my mind, what would I do if a section-front story broke. I'd figure out the chain reaction and was able to do it fast if it happened late.

When we were a slot/rim operation and I was working slot, I always had in the back of my mind, what would I do if a section-front story broke. I'd figure out the chain reaction and was able to do it fast if it happened late.

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This. Always have a "Plan B" in the back of your head, and know which stories HAVE to stay out front, which ones can get pushed inside, and which ones can get punted entirely if necessary. One of the reasons, if at all possible, I've always liked to budget a non-local story with local interest (like one on State. U) for the front. If something happened, I didn't feel bad about moving it.

Here's a question I've wondered for a while. How often do you use kickers?

We use them with every headline, but I feel like it's overkill.

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This is a really good question. I didn't fully understand how useful kickers are until after I was on the desk for awhile.

We use them on almost everything. From a designer's perspective, they are good for a couple of things. For one, they tend to add white space that you might not otherwise design in, which usually makes for more pleasing pages.

Second, depending on your paper's kicker style, they can give you much more freedom when writing heds. With game stories, if you have the final score or the local team's name in the kicker, that means you don't have to write it into the headline every time – which gets tedious. Even if you just have very simple kickers like "NBA" then it saves you from having to specify "NBA Finals" or "NBA Draft" in the hed.

Yeah, we use them quite a bit. We have a couple of options, and we run a scoreline/up next combo with every major sport, then sports-specific labels with most stories inside. And we have page banners for things such as MLB for when we have an open page.

Every time Harrower's book comes up, though, I have to add a caveat. The gentleman doesn't really give a whole lot of thought to Eastern deadlines. I remember one part where he says you cannot begin designing a page until you have all the elements in hand.

That's crazy talking.

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While you can't have the actual story in hand until close to deadline, you still know you're going to put that game in the paper, and you can design the page knowing you should get that story in time.

There are always exceptions, but in general I think (hope) that's the point he meant to get across.

He constructed a flow chart on designing a page. The second or third step, if I remember right, was, "Do you have all your page elements in hand?" If you answered no, the next step was, "Wait until you have your elements."